A Survey of Agent-oriented Development Tools

Abstract

Development tools represent an important additive for the practical realization of software applications, mainly because they help automating development activities and are able to hide complexity from developers. In this chapter, the requirements for tools are generically analyzed by the various tasks that need to be performed in the different development phases. These requirements are the foundation for a detailed investigation of the landscape of available agent-oriented development tools. In order to assess the variety of tools systematically, existing surveys and evaluations have been used to isolate three important categories of tools, which are treated separately: modeling tools, IDEs and phase-specic tools. For each of these categories specic requirements are elaborated, an overview of existing tools is given and one representative tool is presented in more detail.